Sacramento

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One-year-old Cora Franz loves music. She likes to dance and sing, and she already knows her ABCs.

"She is the best baby," her mother Breanne Parsons said. "She's smart as a whip."

The ordeal she and her family went through Friday is one they won't ever forget.

"I don't think I've fully digested what has happened," Parsons said.

Cora is home safe now with her parents after being inside their car when it was stolen by a man right outside their home.

Parsons got Cora strapped into her car seat and pulled up next to their apartment complex – parked where she could see her front door on the second floor. Her car was running with the hazard lights on, she said.

She dashed upstairs to tell her 8-year-old son that it was time to go to the store.

"I ran up the stairs, poked my head in the apartment and told him, ‘C'mon. You got your shoes on. Let's go,’" she said.

But in a matter of seconds, someone stole her car with baby Cora in it.

"I go down the stairs, and my car is gone," Parsons said. "It's totally gone and I freak out."

With her phone in the stolen car, Parsons went door to door, begging for help.

"Somebody answered the door and I told him to call 911 [and] that somebody had stolen my car and it had my baby in it," she said. "It was unbelievable. It was my worst nightmare, my worst nightmare."

Parsons said the response from law enforcement was immediate and about 20 minutes later, word came that Cora had been discovered in a shopping center.

The man charged in connection with the car theft, 25-year-old Aaron Lemus, left the baby in a loading dock area behind a shopping center on Folsom Boulevard in Rancho Cordova, according to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office.

Someone saw the baby and called authorities a short time after.

Parsons is grateful the car thief didn't keep the baby in the car, but she's concerned about what could have happened.

"Why would he drop her off back there where she could have been sitting strapped in her car seat for hours?" Parsons said.

Finally, the moment came when Parsons was reunited with Cora. Seeing and holding her baby again was the most beautiful release of relief.

"I just dropped to my knees and I was like uncontrollably sobbing," she said. "I just couldn't believe it — like I was just glad that everything was intact and she was smiling."

Now, she has a message for other parents about what can happen in an instant.

"You think this won't happen to you, but it will happen to you. It can happen to you. It happened to me," she said. "If you have to take them to go into the store, do it. It doesn't matter if they're asleep; don't leave them in the car unattended. Just don't do it."

The family got the best possible outcome they said: the safe return of their baby after such a terrifying ordeal.

"I think she's OK," Parsons said. "That's all that matters."